An uneventful watch but at least I sleep at the end of it. However, it’s deja vu as far as the sea sickness is concerned. No sooner has the second cup of tea gone down than I am flying out of my bed, helpfully propelled forward by a particularly nasty lurch of the boat, screaming for the bucket which soon receives the contents of my stomach for the second morning in a row. If I didn’t know it was impossible, I would begin to worry that I was pregnant!
Again, sickness over, I am ravenous, although again, can’t face a cup of tea.
Mike listens to the SSB. It would appear that about five WARC boats are now heading our way enroute to Rarotonga rather than Suwarrow, following a day behind us. Looking at our progress, it is obvious that we will arrive tomorrow morning unless something drastic happens to the weather like suddenly losing the wind.
We continue to have a constant 15 to 20 knots of wind and this gives us between 8 and 9 knots. What a pity these results can’t be used for this leg, but having deviated from the route, we will be disqualified from this leg of the rally, as will the other boats heading for Rarotonga.
Lunch is the contents of the fridge – ham, tomatoes, onions, olives, parmesan cheese and crisps – all mixed up to make what turns out to be a rather tasty salad. Mike washes his down with two beers, his daily mechanism for getting to sleep in the afternoon while I keep watch. It pours down in the afternoon, and the boat crashes around so loudly and uncomfortably that I am amazed he can sleep through it all.
We catch no fish, and Mike is on the second of his new lures too. Where is everything? We see nothing again except sun, sea, sky, clouds and rain and I end up counting the miles until we get there.
The ‘morning sickness’ does not continue through the day but I just feel out of sorts and just not right. I’m really looking forward to the further passages – NOT. I am not getting used to them like I thought I would do which is disappointing as there are rather a lot of them to go, some of them depressingly long too. Oh for a Star Trek transporter or for these wonderful ‘stasis’ machines that exist in sci fi films where you can sleep through time!
We start to watch ‘Das Boot’ in the evening, a series about a World War II German u-boat, something which brings back memories for Mike and I as we remember watching it the first time in 1984 from my hospital bed, waiting for Victoria to be born.
Our position is: 20 deg 38 min S, 158 deg 50 min W
Distance so far: 7336 nautical miles
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